The tale of a Rattlesnake (and his two Tengu buddies)

“I just saw some Gas Miners jump into a C5” says Firefly as I log on. Our ever watchful scout has identified 2 Feroxes and a Venture jumping out of their C2 home into a previously empty C5 in the chain. They’re presumably after a Ladar site in the – the rarer Gas present in the Class 5 wormhole making it a juicy target for the pilots. Fortunately this makes them an equally juicy target for us.

We don’t have any sites in the C5 scanned down yet so we’re going to execute the “force them into a bubble” plan.

We’ll prepare two Heavy Interdictors – one will sit in the C2 whilst the other will jump into the C5 when our trap is sprung. Myself and Firefly will provide the killing ships with our covert ops Tech 3 cruisers. We assemble on the C5 wormhole and hold the HICs whilst myself and Fire jump in. Fire cloaks to watch the wormhole whilst I warp off and drop probes as slowly as possible. We’re trying to spook them, after all.

The plan works. Fire reports the 3 ships on close range scan to him, having panicked and ran to their home wormhole. All 3 ships jump and we cross jump the first HIC.

Afnyona and Fire establish tackles on a Ferox and the Venture as the second Ferox jumps back to the C5, polarising himself.

Myself and ST engage and kill him before jumping back. The Ferox and Venture are burning away from the wormhole in an attempt to flee. The Venture is held by Firefly and the Ferox is bubbled by our Onyx. The Ferox explodes, the pod with it, but the Venture pilot won’t wait for us to get the bubble over his pod. He ejects and warps his capsule before our Loki can swap a point to it. The frigate itself meets Fire’s guns head on and explodes. Battle Report of the last two ships.

Thinking that is all, we head home. Firefly has other ideas and jumps into a C3 where he sees a Rattlesnake, a Tengu and a Drake.

None of them at a tower.

We grab 2 Guardians, anticipating sleepers, along with some general combat ships. We bring a Falcon along for a second cloaky tackler too. Fire scans all three ships at one point – a safe spot! He warps at range first whilst destroying his probes to avoid detection. He sees the Drake sat 100km away, but the Rattlesnake and Tengu are sat together fighting – a test of tanks. As Fire slowboats into range, the ships warp back to their tower. Did they see us? We take the opportunity to jump a Falcon in and establish secondary eyes in the system.

The Rattlesnake warps off to a site. An anomaly this time. Fire warps in and sees the Rattlesnake engaging sleepers. The Tengu warps in as well. Time to go!

Fire decloaks and points the Rattlesnake as our Falcon points the Tengu. We jump the main fleet in and warp to the site. The Falcon is going down hard so we throw all reps onto it.

The Falcons survives the aggro of the remaining sleepers and the two hostile ships and we begin to whittle down the Rattlesnake’s rather hefty shields.

The unexpected then happens – a second Tengu warps in.

One thing on a list of “what not to do” is “Do not warp in a sub-par force to reinforce a doomed allied fleet”. This is also known as “Don’t kill yourself for no good reason“.

The Tengu has just killed himself as one of our fleet establishes a point quickly. We kill the 1.5 Bill Rattlesnake and his 1 Bill Capsule. The first Tengu dies, quickly followed by the second. Both cost over a Bill. Total damage done? 6.8 Bill. All because they didn’t watch D-scan or scout their wormhole (we were sat on the direct other side of their static before they started)